I consider Peertube to fall under the “comically bad experience” for a multitude of reasons. There’s too many to really get into but to give you an idea of my experience with the platform, after the “pick a meaningless instance to house yourself” gauntlet that all fediverse outlets do, I was met with not one or two, but three instance refusals to allow me to create an account “because I was not a creator”(the admins literally emailed me to state that was the reason they declined my membership) so was left with the prospect of not having any means to manage or track subscriptions, get notifications of new content, etc. In spite of this, I tried to push through figuring I was missing an obvious manner of use that made it better than it initially seemed. I started searching for content I regularly subscribe to on YT, like “guitar playthough, rehab, urban exploration, drag racing, abandoned” and kept getting results 5 years old, completely unrelated to my search query or so poorly created that it was practically unwatchable.

I tried really hard to use it, it’s just clearly for the nerd crowd that wants to use it in spite of how bad it is as a video serving social platform. I love Lemmy, tolerate mastodon and keep checking on things like Loops and Pixelfed but Peertube is an entirely different beast. It punishes those that try to use it in any way like YT.

I thought most profits come from patreon and ad reads rather than youtube ads.

I think you’re absolutely right but if they move to another platform, they lose their subscriber base, views and interaction that advertisers demand so they don’t bother with the alternate platforms and for that reason alone, there’s nobody willing to waste time on platforms that none of their creators use.

I would have appreciated some of my creators at least copying their releases but nobody does. I don’t know if it’s hard to manage another platform that makes it not worth the time for the minuscule view count they get from it.